River of Blue Fire (38 page)

They dropped !Xabbu from a few feet up. He landed, crouching, at Renie's feet, baffled and defeated. Scarecrow lifted the tube in his soft fingers and waggled it. “Stuffing refill,” he explained. “I was a little less tightly-packed than I prefer. Things have been busy lately, personal grooming suffers—you know how it is.” He looked down to Weedle and Malinger, who had landed by his booted feet and now were picking fleas off each other. “Call the other flymonks, will you?”

Weedle leaned back his head and made a high-pitched whooping noise. Dozens of winged shapes suddenly swept down from the darkness overhead, like bats disturbed in their cavern roost. Within seconds, Renie and !Xabbu were pinioned head and foot by dozens of clinging monkey hands.

“Now, leave the emily on the floor—I want to talk to her—and take the other two to the tourist cell, then come right back. Be sharp about it! The tiktoks are going to be out of service, so everybody's pulling double shifts until further notice.”

Renie felt herself lifted into the darkness, wrapped in a cloud of vibrating wings.

“Not all of you!” the Scarecrow bellowed. “Weedle, get back here and reattach this stuffing-duct. And change my damn filters!”

T
HE door clanged shut behind them, a solid, permanent sound.

Renie looked around their new accommodations, taking in the institutional, mint-green paint that covered walls, ceiling, and floor. “This isn't quite how I imagined the Emerald City.”

“Ah, look,” someone else said from the far end of the long cell. “Company.”

The man sitting in the shadows against the wall, who seemed to be their only cellmate, was slim and good-looking (or at least his sim was, Renie reminded herself.) He appeared as a dark-skinned Caucasian, with thick black hair brushed back in a slightly old-fashioned style, and a mustache only slightly less extravagant than the metal ones the tiktoks' wore. Most astonishingly, though, he was smoking a cigarette.

The sudden leap of longing at the sight of the glowing ember did not smother her caution, but as she swiftly reviewed the facts—he was in here with them, so he was probably a prisoner too, and therefore an ally; it wasn't like she was going to trust him or anything, since he might not even be real—she found herself coming to the conclusion she had hoped to reach.

“Do you have another one of those?”

The man raised one eyebrow, looking her up and down. “Prisoners get rich from cigarettes.” He seemed to have a slight accent to his English, something Renie couldn't recognize. “What is in it for me?”

“Renie?” !Xabbu, not understanding the treacherous lure of even noncarcinogenic cigarettes, reached up to tug her hand. “Who is this person?”

The dark-haired man did not seem to notice the talking baboon. “Well?”

Renie shook her head. “Nothing. We have nothing to trade. We came here like you see us.”

“Hmmm. Well, then you owe me a favor.” He reached into a pocket on his chest, pulled out a red pack of something called Lucky Strikes, and shook one out. He lit it off his own and held it out. Renie crossed the cell to take it, !Xabbu trailing behind. “You have the gear to taste that?”

She was wondering the same thing. When she inhaled there was hot air in her throat, and a feeling of something filling her lungs. In fact, she could almost swear she could taste the tobacco. “Oh, God, that's wonderful,” she said, blowing out a stream of smoke.

The man nodded as though some great truth had been revealed, then slipped the cigarettes back into the pocket of his overalls. He wore the same factory-issue boiler suit that she had seen on all the other henrys in Emerald, but he did not strike her as one of those domesticated creatures. “Who are you?” she asked.

He looked irritated. “Who
are you
?”

Renie introduced herself and !Xabbu under the same assumed names as she had given in Kunohara's bugworld—after all, she told herself, the stranger had only given her a cigarette, not donated a kidney. “We just stumbled in,” she said, assuming that if this man were not one of the bovine residents of the simworld, their outlander status must be obvious. “And apparently that's a crime around here. Who are you and how did you wind up here?”

“Azador,” the stranger said.

Confused by his accent, Renie at first thought he had said “At the door,” and she turned to look. He corrected the misunderstanding.

“
I
am Azador. And I am here because I made the mistake of offering advice to His Wise Majesty the King.” His smirk contained an entire world's worth of world-weariness. Renie had to admit that he had quite a handsome sim. “You are both Citizens, yes?”

Renie looked at !Xabbu, who was sitting on his heels well out of Azador's reach. The monkey-skimps returned glance was inscrutable. “Yes, we are.”

The stranger did not seem interested in gleaning more details, which left Renie feeling she had made the right decision. “Good. As am I. It is a shame that, like me, you have had your freedom stolen from you.”

“What's with this place?” She suddenly remembered Emily. “The scarecrow-man—the king—he has our friend. Will he hurt her?”

Azador shrugged: he could take no responsibility for the foibles of others. “They have all gone mad here. Whatever this place once was, it has fallen apart. You see this in bad simulations. It is why I offered my advice.” He stubbed out his cigarette. Renie recalled that her own was burning down, unsmoked; she drew on it again as Azador continued. “You know the film of Oz, do you not?”

“I do, yes,” Renie answered. “But this doesn't seem quite right. It seems much . . . much bleaker. And this is Kansas—Oz wasn't in Kansas, it was somewhere else, wasn't it?”

“Here, it did not start this way.” He took out another cigarette, then changed his mind and tucked it behind his ear. Renie found herself watching it avidly, even with one burning between her fingers. She didn't like that feeling. “I told you,” Azador went on, “the simulation has fallen apart. It has two connected locations, Oz—which I think was also a book, for reading—and Kansas, the American state. They were like the two ends of the hourglass, you see, with a slender part between them where things could pass back and forth.”

!Xabbu was inspecting the cell with solemn attention. Renie thought he seemed upset.

“But something went very wrong on the Oz side,” Azador said. “I have heard terrible stories—murder, rape, cannibalism. I think it has been all but abandoned now. The three men—the Citizens—who were first playing the characters of Scarecrow, Tinman, and Cowardly Lion, all brought their respective kingdoms through to the Kansas side.”

“So it's some kind of war game?” she asked. “How stupid! Why recreate something sweet like Oz just to make it into another shoot-em-up?”
How typical of men
, she wanted to add, but didn't.

Azador gave her a lazy smile, as though he read her thoughts. “It did not start quite that way. The Tinman, the Lion—they are not those who originally began the game. They came in from outside, just as you did. But they have taken over the simworld, or nearly so. Only the Scarecrow fellow had a strong enough position to resist them, but I think he will not last much longer.”

“And that other stuff? For a moment, it seemed like the whole simulation turned upside down or something. Did you feel that?”

!Xabbu had climbed to the top bunk of the bed nearest the wall, and was examining the tiny, screened window. “Do you remember what Atasco said?” he asked. “When that thing ran across the room, that thing made of light?”

Renie went cold at the mention of the murdered man's name, but Azador seemed to be paying little attention. “I don't . . .”

“He said that he thought the system was perhaps growing too fast. At least, that is what I remember. Or growing too big, perhaps. And Kunohara said . . .”

“!Xabbu!”

Now Azador did take notice. “You met Kunohara? Hideki Kunohara?”

“No,” Renie said hurriedly. “We met someone who knew him, or claimed they did.”

“The bastard found me in a flesh-eating plant—a ‘pitcher plant,' I think it is called.” Azador's indignation sounded very real. “He lectured me, as though I were a child, on the complexity of nature or some nonsense. And then he left me there, standing in foul-smelling liquid that was doing its best to digest me! Bastard.”

Despite her worry, Renie was hard-pressed not to laugh. It did sound rather like the odd, self-satisfied little man they had met. “But you got away.”

“I always do.” Something dark passed behind his eyes. He changed the moment by taking the cigarette he had stashed behind his ear and elaborately applying the flame of a chunky silver lighter to it. When he had put the lighter back in his pocket, he rose and walked slowly past her toward the cell door, where he stood humming an unfamiliar song. She suddenly felt sure that he had spent lots of time in places like this, either in VR or plain old RL.

!Xabbu crept down from the upper bunk and leaned in close to Renie's ear. “I said those names on purpose,” he whispered. “To see what he would do.”

“I wish you hadn't.” More anger seeped through her quiet tone than she had intended. “Let me handle the cloak-and-dagger stuff next time.” !Xabbu gave her a surprised look, then moved to the far corner and crouched there, examining the floor. Renie felt terrible, but before she could do anything about it, Azador had strolled back to their end.

“I will go mad if I stay here any longer,” he said abruptly. “We will escape, yes? I have knowledge that will give us our freedom. A plan of escape.”

Renie looked around, startled. “Are you sure you should say things like that? What if the cell's bugged?”

Azador waved his hand dismissively. “Everything is bugged, of course. It does not matter. The Scarecrow creature does not have enough subjects left to review the tapes—miles and miles of tapes! The technology of this Kansas simworld is strictly twentieth century—have you not noticed?”

“If you have such a good plan,” !Xabbu asked, “why are you still here?”

Renie had been wondering how the stranger knew so much about the Scarecrow's security procedures, but she had to admit that the Bushman's question was a good one too.

“Because this escape needs more than one person,” Azador said. “And now we have two people and a very smart monkey!”

“I am not a monkey.” !Xabbu frowned. “I am a man.”

Azador laughed. “Of course you are a man. I was making a joke. You should not be so sensitive.”

“You,” !Xabbu suggested darkly, “should perhaps make better jokes.”

A
LTHOUGH he would tell them no other details of his plan, Azador insisted they must wait until evening before attempting their escape—although how the man would tell the time in a cell whose only window looked out onto a horizontal airshaft, Renie could not guess. But she welcomed the opportunity to rest. Both their tornado-thrashed sojourn in Kansas and their dragonfly-crashing venture through Kunohara's bugworld had entailed one life-or-death struggle after another, all of them exhausting and painful.

!Xabbu was immersed in a self-sufficient silence that Renie knew was in part due to hurt feelings, and Azador was sitting with his eyes closed, whistling tunelessly but quietly. She found herself for the first time in a long while able simply to sit and think.

Not least of what occupied her was their mysterious cellmate. Azador had proved unwilling to be drawn out on the subject of his own background, or what brought him to this simworld or to the Other-land network in the first place. If he was not a living, breathing Citizen, he was a Puppet that had been constructed with great care to seem like one—he spoke of the network and its illusions with every sign of a knowledge so intimate as to border on contempt. He was also quite impressive, in his way, and not just because of his handsome sim—Renie could almost imagine the word “swashbuckling” applied to him—but at times he seemed to show a different side, flashes of someone vulnerable, even haunted.

But why waste time thinking about this stranger when there were so many other things to consider, so many life-or-death problems still unsolved?

Well, for one thing, girl
, she told herself,
you're a bit randy. It's been too long between men
—
way too long
—
and this constant danger, all this adrenaline, it's getting to you
.

She looked at the bulge of the package in Azador's pocket, was sorely tempted to ask for another cigarette. Surely anything that helped her relax would be a good thing? She felt like one of the Tiktoks, wound far beyond its optimum tension. But she did not like the way she was thinking about cigarettes again, as though they were somehow just as important as the quest to save her brother. She had hardly thought about them in two days—was it going to start all over again now? She hadn't eaten anything since entering the network, and she wasn't obsessing about
that
.

With strong effort, Renie forced her mind away from distractions, back to the problems at hand.

Instead of their entrance into the network bringing answers, the mysteries had only deepened. Who was this Circle group Kunohara had mentioned—were they really the same people who had helped !Xabbu leave the Okavango to attend school? If so, what could it mean? Did !Xabbu know more than he was telling? But if so, why admit he knew anything about the Circle at all? She dismissed this newest line of thought, too. The entire Grail Brotherhood thing was so broad and so confusing, and there was so much she did not know, that at some point it began to seem like someone's street-corner rant, all absurdist self-referentiality and throbbing paranoia. She should stick to the big ideas.

But what
were
the big ideas, exactly? What had they learned? Anything? Kunohara had seemed to insinuate that there was some kind of conflict going on between the Grail people and this Circle group. But he had also suggested that both sides might be wrong, and that the system was somehow more than they realized. Could that, and the other things they had seen—Atasco's scuttling anomaly, the false creatures and effects catalogued at the Hive, the bizarre breakdown in the Scarecrow's throne room—be indicators of a system in trouble?